Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

Search This Blog

24.5.12

If any lesson should emanate from the failed attempt arrange union
between my employer Louisiana State University Shreveport and Louisiana Tech
University, it’s that a merger on these terms will not fix whatever ails higher
education delivery in the Shreveport-Bossier metropolitan area.

All along, advocates argued the primary reason for the combination was
to accomplish this. They described the symptoms that purported to signal
deficiency in this area: relatively low enrollment numbers, almost no growth,
and apparent difficulty in supplying programs. But they really couldn’t, or
would not, articulate the causes of this. Instead, by having LSUS subsumed into
Tech, essentially they argued that in order to cure the unknown disease the
patient had to be killed and then resurrected as a symbiont.

While the idea had a great many area supporters, none of whom ever had
served as a tenured faculty member or administrator in higher education, in the
political and business communities in the area, as well as interest groups who
assert their missions encompass education delivery, the naïveté of the notion was stunning in that so many failed to grasp
its fundamental shortcoming. They appeared ignorant of a central truism in
academia (and government), that institutions as organizations first and
foremost do not act with a larger environmental purpose in mind – that is, to
maximize higher education delivery statewide – nor to serve peripheral,
specific environments – to Tech, the Shreveport/Bossier metropolitan area.

23.5.12

Good things can take a lot of time to manifest, but this is getting
ridiculous with the Louisiana Legislature’s continuing inaction, if not actual
sabotage, of the ability of a significant proportion of its citizenry to
exercise a simple civil liberty.

That liberty being the ability to travel around and patronize commercial
establishments without going into respiratory distress. As medical advances
improve quality of life for those with a disability that impairs breathing,
from having asthma to suffering chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to using
mechanical ventilation, who now comprise a tenth of
the population that as a whole will continue to increase in proportion as it
ages, the discrimination that occurs by giving preference to those who choose
to smoke in some avenues of commerce in Louisiana makes this violation all the more
egregious.

Currently, 25
states ban any smoking in public establishments of any kind, with
extensions emanating outside from them as well. Louisiana and some other states
ban some indoor smoking and in Louisiana in a radius 25 feet from passageways
for certain buildings such as hospitals and educational facilities. Smokers decry
the restriction of their behavior and certain industries feel they might lose
business if smoking were not allowed, but in the conflict of civil liberties
that results – one group that wants to engage in a voluntary activity not
essential to sustaining their lives as an aside to interacting commercially versus
another that involuntarily suffers an ability to sustain life when the first group
engages in that activity while interacting in the same commerce, thereby negating
its members’ ability to interact in that kind of commerce – the preponderance
of evidence shows the second group’s claim as more compelling, to not to have
to suffer through that environment, meriting government action to ensure they
may exercise that more vital liberty.

22.5.12

As the state’s next fiscal year budget hurtles to resolution, the
central debate among Louisiana policy-makers has become over the use of
“one-time” money. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong debate using the wrong terminology.

To take a typical definition one might run across in the popular media,
and one seemingly accepted by many politicians, these dollars are those “that likely will only
materialize once.” The problem is, for much of what gets designated as this,
it’s simply not accurate.

Some of what gets lumped into
this category honestly can be called that. For example, one portion of money
that never will come as recurring revenue is the sale or lease of the New
Orleans Adolescent Hospital, now shuttered for a few years. That $35 million
indeed is a single shot,“one-time” (and, ironically or perhaps hypocritically, remains
in the budget after self-proclaimed budget hawks squawked they had purged
the budget of this kind of spending).

21.5.12

My first full-time teaching job out of graduate school (although
technically still in it: I had just completed my exams and was working on my
dissertation) was at the University of Southern Mississippi, where I had the
fortune to run into some older students who recruited me for their intramural softball
teams. One team played regular slow-pitch, where I pitched and played catcher
(never mind I was six feet tall, 130 pounds, with glasses) and managed a high
on-base percentage through walks (because I could see so well with the glasses). We made the
quarterfinals before losing.

But the other team I was on went all the way to finals. This was the co-ed
version, where sexes alternated between batters. Here, I was the pitcher, for a
very simple reason: I could put the ball right over the plate almost all of the
time, because in this league, you pitched to your own side at bat. The object
was to toss as many fat pitches in there as possible. So I'd deliver them and our guys would mash
them to the fences, even over them while our gals made contact and looped them
over the infielders. The only game we lost was the championship where we got
out-mashed and outhit by a bunch of greek guys and gals who these days probably
all work for the people I graduated with from the Owen Graduate School of
Management at Vanderbilt University.

I suspect in his past former Gov. Buddy
Roemer must have been an excellent pitcher on this kind of co-ed team,
given the number of softballs right over the plate he has tossed during his
pseudo-campaign for the presidency. Plan A in regard to that was to get the
Republican nomination. When
that no longer suited his psychological needs because of its impossibility,
he went to Plan B: obtaining the nomination from a quasi-political party called
Americans Elect, which was supposed to offer a platform for a candidate that
met the group’s funders’ conception of centrism chosen by the masses fed up
with the two major parties.

20.5.12

This past week, the New Orleans
Times-Picayune ran an interesting series on Louisiana corrections policy
and its larger ramifications to society. But perhaps the most revealing
information from it, pointing to an issue which scarcely gets addressed, came
in the form of portraits of the raw product that fuels imprisonment – the miscreants
themselves, how they got there, and how policy affects their behavior prior to
their infusing into the system.

The series focuses on the state’s stern criminal justice policies that
make it apparently the lockup capital of the world as its rate is highest in
the U.S., which has the highest rate in the world, and policy to change it that
would produce fewer people incarcerated yet still punished and perhaps directed
in ways to reduce repeat offenses. It makes the case that the high rate of
imprisonment partly is a function of current policies (although some are about
to be relaxed it appears) that if changed would alleviate the condition
somewhat with benefits of the change to society exceeding the costs.

However, it does not stop to ponder the nexus between rates of crime
and rates of imprisonment. One might think a high imprisonment rate must have a
high rate of crime to supply the raw material. Think again: next to the U.S.,
Singapore has the highest lockup rate in the world, but one of the lowest crime
rates, showing an intervening variable exists in the theory. And that is culture:
one that accentuates the future-oriented values of work and thrift to keep
poverty rates low rather than the present-oriented values of immediate
gratification and conspicuous consumption, that features more helpful than
confrontational attitudes between police and the citizenry, and promotes the
idea that people need to work within societal systems with each other to try to
achieve individual goals that have collective benefits. And while the argument
could be made that the authoritarian history of its government encouraged this
(as it does in culturally-similar Hong Kong
today), it’s been two decades since Singapore transformed into a genuine
democracy.

About Me

Subscribe To

Comment publishing requirements

You must be a registered user with an OpenID-compliant service to leave comments, which will be moderated. Any comments that do not address issues in the post for which they are intended will not be posted; neither will those that utterly lack intellectual coherence.